I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my dad as we'd have a snack and a Coke (the real stuff, from a returnable glass bottle). Sometimes he'd read his Scientific American, and I remember once he commented that fusion had been "ten years out" as long as he could recall. He passed away 33 years ago.

I think for any chance of progress, ITER needs to fail, or at least quick sucking up all of the funding. There's actually some interesting stuff going on. A good review.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my dad as we'd have a snack and a Coke (the real stuff, from a returnable glass bottle). Sometimes he'd read his Scientific American, and I remember once he commented that fusion had been "ten years out" as long as he could recall. He passed away 33 years ago.

I think for any chance of progress, ITER needs to fail, or at least quick sucking up all of the funding. There's actually some interesting stuff going on. A good review.

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Yes, I've heard all the fusion jokes myself too. But I think there are two ways of looking at something like this.

You're right until proven wrong

You're wrong until proven right

Given the stakes. I always choose the former. (that is, until the founds run out... LOL! )

Q: what's the difference between a stubborn and a perseverant person?
A: the end result

But I wonder, how is the energy (heat) supposed to be extracted from the device and put to practical use if the thing is surrounded by "425 tonnes (470 tons) of superconducting, super-cooled magnets"?

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That's not that hard to deal with -- the magnets have to be cooled, not what is inside of them. Imagine an MRI machine at a hospital -- the magnets are at liquid helium temp (~4 K) but the patient is at room temp. It wouldn't be overly challenging (in comparison to other hurdles) to have the magnets surrounding a superheated steam region.

Once that's done, the next problem is extracting power from it. However the efficiency is much, much less than 1 so keeping the reaction going requires more power input than what is released.

Also, the generator would consist of magnetohydrodynamic process rather than a conventional steam turbine and a rotating machine. Incidentally, Hans Alfen presented a theoretical model of a fusion power plant based on the flow of hot plasma like the sun. The old fashioned magnetic confinement and current pulse technique utilized Alfen's theory. However, that's as far as it progressed.

I think a better approach to nuclear fusion electrical energy is a pulsed plasma approach such as from Tri Alpha Energy or LPP Fusion. The intent of these systems is to create multiple short bursts of hydrogen-boron fusion, whose byproducts are helium and energy. This reaction generate no damaging neutrons, as the deuterium-tritium fusion process used by the tokamak, stellerator and Lockheed designs does, which requires extensive shielding and generates radioactive waste.
The pulses plasma devices are relatively small, inexpensive systems, requiring no superconducting magnets, as compared to the huge, multi-billion dollar, continuous plasma machines such as the ITER tokamak, or the German stellerator. I don't see those very expensive devices with their huge superconducting magnetics ever beinging an economic source of fusion power.

I like their chances, too. I looked into investing in LPP but I didn't care for the arrangements. But their approach is interesting and I tend to think they're closer than anyone else.

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I just looked at the website. Pretty cool stuff but it looks like they don't know diddley about real world ultra high vacuum systems.http://lppfusion.com/ff-1-moves-toward-goldilocks-bake-out/
5 day bakeouts limited to 150C to remove water vapor because of poor UHV vacuum materials like Mylar is just bad engineering.